is to protect the ability of all practicing physicians to serve as their patients’ primary health care advocate and to confront unnecessary and overbearing regulation that limits any physicians' ability to serve their patients.

Ours is a David and Goliath grassroots effort to restore the integrity of our profession and the freedom to practice medicine, to eliminate unwarranted, costly, often hazardous intervention that threatens the health of both physicians and patients.

The vast majority of practicing physicians do NOT have a voice in Washington. Instead, we have seen our noble profession lose its moral compass to the influences of money, power, and greed at the expense of front line physicians.

Nowhere are these influences clearer than with the US physician credentialing system managed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). The ACGME is comprised of the $662M AMA, the $280M American Hospital Association, and the $452M Association of American Medical Colleges, and the American Board of Medical Specialties with its 24 affiliated member boards whose collective assets approach $1 billion, among others. It should be noted that the AMA has less than 15% of practicing physicians as current members, and the the AHA is a group that represents the interests of hospital administrators.

The regulatory burdens imposed on physicians in the name of health care safety and quality by some of these organizations of the ACGME have led to massive profit (and in some cases, even fraud) by some members of these bureaucracies, diverting time, energy and precious resources from patient care. Patients put their lives on the line trusting that their physicians will do what’s best for them. Physicians must be free to provide this care without fear of professional reprisal or intimidation by these organizations that are completely unaccountable to our patients.

Numerous grassroots groups that have strived to protect the patient-doctor relationship have loosely collaborated for years but now are aligned and have gathered under the umbrella of Practicing Physicians of America.

The healthcare we are clamoring for is not an employment bureau for the powerful. It is not a feeding trough for special interests who criticize those who protest with accusations of insensitivity to those in need. Ours is a vision for healthcare that includes such seemingly opposing values as freedom and equality, mercy and merit, caring for both people on the margins and the power of individual choice, and then acknowledges these contradictions and finds the creative middle. Individual physicians are invited to magnify their voice by joining PPA.